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Abstract

In 1984-quite unlike the depressed protagonist of George Orwell's novel-I found myself happily ensconced as a senior research associate in the department of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). I had received my Ph.D. in biochemistry from the same institution nine years earlier; had left for two years to do a post-doctoral fellowship in the field of cancer biology at Georgetown University and the National Institutes of Health; but had returned to U AB at the invitation of my doctoral mentor, Jim Lacey, to work on a project grant he had been awarded from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the area of origin of life science.